How My Sister's Illness Changed My Life
Introduction:
Whenever I speak to people in English, they hardly ever guess I was from Saudi Arabia. This Design Your Own Learning piece reveals the full story behind how I managed to self-educate myself into becoming a fluent English speaker. As a new transfer at SLA, no one is familiar with my past and my peers don't know enough about me to get a general idea of my personality. The purpose of this project is to open myself up to others and have them acquainted with who I am and the tragic events in my childhood that influenced me to make life-changing decisions. Aside from revealing my past, the goal of this project is to also inform people that even when they go through tragic events where they reach the point of giving up, they can turn things around by taking advantage of their bad experience and using it as motivation to become stronger. In my case, I took advantage of the horrendous experiences that started with my sister's illness to become an avid English speaker with full responsibility for my family in the United States.
This was an exciting project for me to make because it reveals things about me that not even my own family knew about. With feedback assistance from Mr. Block and Ms. Jeanette, each draft I made for the script was more thoughtful and concise than the previous one, until I reached the final draft presented above.
Transcript:
Being from Saudi Arabia, learning English and speaking it fluently without an accent was an enormous challenge. I went through the most difficult time of my life to become an avid English speaker succeeding in an American high school. It all started in the summer of 2006 when my sister was diagnosed with a form of cancer called Lymphoma. At the time, I never saw myself coming all the way to the United States, but due to my sister’s illness, my father decided to admit her to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Because of the extensive duration of the therapy, we stayed in Philadelphia for several months and I was enrolled in an American school for the first time.
My first day at McCall school was a nightmare I will never forget. I was scared and nervous like I had never been before, to the point where I couldn’t even take my jacket off in a hot classroom, because I was unable to speak or understand English well. Due to my weakness in English, I couldn’t make any friends and always sat alone staring at the American classmates lively conversing with each other, sometimes glancing at me and following with a giggle. Not knowing what was being said and constantly wondering if I was made fun of tormented me. This resulted in a severe academic and social struggle that left me devastated.
In January of 2007, my sister was in complete remission and we returned to Saudi Arabia. I couldn’t be any happier knowing I would go back to my friends at my old school and not spend another day at McCall. I put the horrendous experience behind me and moved on. A year and a half later, we were shocked to hear that my sister’s cancer had relapsed and come back even stronger. Immediately, we were set to go back to Philadelphia, and as luck may have it, I was back at McCall once again. Even though almost two years had passed, nothing had changed. I was horrified, depressed, and often came up with excuses to miss school.
There was, however, one day I was eager to go to school: the day before christmas. The class planned a big celebration, but I never got the chance to attend and finally socialize with my classmates. When I woke up that morning, I saw my mother in the kitchen, which was unusual because she was staying with my sister in the hospital. Intuitively, I assumed my sister was finally back home. Each time I asked my mother where my sister was, she stared at me with suspenseful silence. When I raised my voice, she said with a tear falling on her cheek that my sister passed away.
The next day, I was aboard the most torturous flight of my life back to Saudi Arabia. Words cannot describe the anguish of being on the same plane with your only sister, whom you’d seen less than 48 hours ago, but is now beneath you in a coffin. At this point, I was willing to throw everything away and never come back to the United States. However, I kept thinking of how my sister loved to teach me English. I looked back on my time spent at McCall, and being a person who hates failure, I never wanted to experience that hell again. These thoughts drove me to make a decision that would change my life. I set a goal for myself to learn English so that when I spoke it, no one would guess I was from Saudi Arabia. By achieving that, I would become the youngest and first person in the family to fluently speak English and never again struggle in an American school.
My school taught all subjects in Arabic, so I had to come up with my own methods to learn English. I implemented the language in all of my daily activities, like reading books or online articles and watching TV or listening to music. Moreover, I had to give up a native part of me in the process. We each have an inner voice or a voice of consciousness that always communicates and resonates within us in our native language. I took a big step and changed that voice into English, a decision that would result in a permanent effect. Ever since then, I always “communicated” with myself in English and hardly ever in Arabic. I was able to lose the accent faster than I could remember and after years of daily practice, I finally understood English just as much as I understood Arabic.
When I was in middle school, my school opened an international program where all subjects were taught in English, and I immediately enrolled. I demonstrated significant academic performance and continued to improve even more now that the school was also teaching me English. Eventually, I became the most avid English speaker in the family and this gave me a lot of responsibilities. My father put me in charge of fully orchestrating all our trips to the United States, but most importantly, he made me in charge of communicating with hospitals, health centers, and insurance companies for my little brother who has Down Syndrome and Autism. Managing to turn tragic experiences into motivation, discover my own ways to solve problems, and experience the responsibility of a father without even turning 18 as a result of my childhood dilemma shows that even if you think you’ve experienced the worst, you have the ability to utilize that experience for your own advantage. You can grow up into a person you never envisioned yourself to be.
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